Daily Inspiration Quote by James Broughton

Writing, for James Broughton, isn’t a record of feeling so much as a trigger for it. “I often start writing in order to excite an expansive emotion” frames creation as deliberate mood-engineering: the page is not where emotion gets deposited after the fact, but where it’s manufactured, amplified, and made habitable. The verb “excite” is doing heavy lifting. It suggests a bodily jolt, a switch flipped, an act with risk. He’s not waiting for inspiration like a weather report; he’s provoking it.

“Expansive” is equally pointed. This isn’t the clenched-fist intensity of confession or the neat catharsis of a tidy arc. It’s an outward-moving state: curiosity, erotic aliveness, spiritual spaciousness, the kind of emotion that makes the self feel less like a sealed container. That aligns with Broughton’s wider cultural moment and artistic practice. As a mid-century filmmaker-poet working adjacent to the American avant-garde and later embraced by queer artistic communities, he treated art as permission to enlarge the range of what could be felt and shown. His work often rejects the prestige of restraint in favor of play, sensuousness, and a lightly defiant joy.

The subtext is a critique of art-as-credential. If writing’s purpose is to “excite” expansion, then technique is secondary to transformation. Craft becomes a means of altering consciousness, not proving intelligence. It’s a quietly radical intent: art as a chosen technology of freedom, starting from the first sentence.